Pasko Rakic, (Croatian: Paško Rakić; Serbian: Пашко Ракић), born 1933, Ruma, Serbia) is a neuroscientist at Yale University. Rakic has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences USA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Presidency of the Society for Neuroscience. He was a co-recipient, with Thomas Jessell and Sten Grillner, of the inaugural Kavli Prize for Neuroscience in 2008. He is also a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Born in Syrmian city of Ruma, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Vojvodina, Serbia) into a Serbian family, Rakic graduated with a degree in medicine (M.D.) from the University of Belgrade (Belgrade Medical School) in Serbia then embarked on a career as a neurosurgeon. He also received Ph.D from Belgrade University. His research career began in 1962, with a fellowship at Harvard University.

According to Nature Medicine, his first experiments required "a special grant, nearly 200 rhesus monkeys and so much radioactive thymidine that manufacturers had to retool their entire production system to provide it." Rakic injected the monkeys' fetuses with radioactive thymidine at a particular time after conception. Only replicating cells took up the radioactive label, which enabled Rakic to trace the lineages of brain cells as they were created. He and his team then sliced the brain of each monkey into 7,000 sections for the benefit of future researchers. Because he used a radiolabel that decays slowly, the slides should be useful for years, and have so far led to more than 24 papers.